Kate lay back and tipped her head to the sky. Above her was a vastness of blue and the rounded tops of the hills stretching beyond the waving branches of the forest. Staying so intensely angry was exhausting and she found it ebbed and flowed like a tide, sometimes fading to a dull throb of hurt.
She might not be able to forgive Emily, but there were still a few things she had to know. ‘About Joe …’ she said, turning her head and glancing at Emily who had retreated behind her hair and sunglasses and was staring morosely out at the landscape as if it pleased her not at all. Kate suspected there was more to the Joe story than Emily had so far confided.
‘What else can you possibly know? I already told you things weren’t like I imagined. It was awful. I left. We divorced. What else is there?’
‘Tell me how he made you feel, how he made you like this? I want to understand.’
That got a reaction, a swift head-turn. ‘Like what?’
‘Like half a person. Scared of the world and everything that’s to come. I found you hiding out in that bookshop going nowhere, Em. You didn’t even look like yourself.’
‘And now …’
‘And now, there have been glimpses of the Em I know and—’ She stopped abruptly and felt the rush of tears thickening her throat. She wondered if Emily was crying behind her dark glasses. Her own anger had morphed into inescapable sadness, so acute she felt sick. The loss of Emily and Luke simultaneously was like a severed limb, something she might learn to accept, but would never fully recover from.
Emily spoke softly. ‘He made me feel exactly that, like half a person. I didn’t know who I was and I would have gone on tying myself in knots trying to please him. I overlooked his affairs because I always thought he would change. Or maybe I just believed it was what I deserved … I don’t know. Bronwyn was different. She was so young. They lost me my job and my self-respect. I knew it was time to draw a line, even though it took me too long to get around to finally doing it.’
Kate frowned.
‘He left me broken and I had to rebuild myself. It’s been a long road back.’
‘Emily, you are over him, aren’t you?’
A quick, guilty glance. Emily removed the sunglasses and met Kate’s eyes and, yes, they shimmered with tears that trembled on the edge of her lashes but did not fall. ‘I’m so sick of crying over him.’ She smiled and dashed at her eyes. ‘I’ve been speaking to him, Kate. I … Like I said, I was relieved at first that we were over. But, after a while, I felt terrible. Some days I literally couldn’t make myself get out of bed. I had moved in with Lena, but I felt so bad, Kate. And then, one day I called him and hearing his voice gave me a lift. I felt better for a while. I wanted more. Then you came and everything was different. I managed to wean myself off.’ She stopped to catch her breath, turned and took hold of Kate’s arm, her face fearful. ‘That’s why you can’t leave again. Not over something stupid I did a decade ago. I was scared of losing you then and I still am. I don’t know how to do this without you.’
‘Do what?’
‘The shop. Life. Everything. I was scared all the time before you came.’
Kate exhaled. ‘You haven’t noticed the change in you, but I have. You’re a different person from the girl I found hiding in that mouldy bookshop when I arrived. You’re strong, capable. You’ve done so much of this yourself. I was only here to guide you a bit. Now you can do it by yourself.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Emily said emphatically. ‘I thought I was so mad at you, but now all I can think is how awful it will be if you go.’
Kate pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. ‘I have to go, Emily. I can’t stay now.’ She was almost shouting again. ‘You’ll make a success of things. Now you know you don’t need Joe. And you don’t need me either.’
Emily thought how fragile was her recovery, how it had felt – until quite recently – as if the only thing that could ease her mind was the sound of his voice. How she had craved hearing him sing her song one more time. And now Kate would leave and Emily’s guilt and doubt would fester and destroy everything.
At least you didn’t have kids, Kate had said, when Emily was explaining the break-up. As if it had therefore been a clean break, a neat incision bisecting the shared parts of their lives and separating them from one another like a scalpel through flesh. Emily flinched and thought of Abby in the hospital, pushing a tiny life out of her, making a future for her and Dan that could never be dissolved.
The silence of the woods behind them became oppressive and Emily leapt to her feet. ‘Let’s go on.’
*
Near the summit, over an hour later, they paused for another break. Emily selected a spot where the valley uncurled, resplendent, before them and the last curve of the hill loomed at their backs. Gazing down at the bluish blur of the firth on the horizon and the stone-scattered velvet slopes, Kate smiled at Emily’s choice; for surely any more cross words or hint of confrontation would seem out of place amongst the waving grass and the dense bracken, against a backdrop of so much sky: pale, pale blue and impossibly vast, with mallow-soft clouds gently scudding by.
Kate had been mulling things over the entire way up the hill. A part of her wanted to forgive Emily and ask forgiveness in return – they had both said things they did not mean. No, they had said things they meant exactly, things they ought to have aired long before. And that was good, cathartic even; but Kate just couldn’t get past the image of Emily and Luke together, and the concern on Emily’s face in those subsequent days as Kate begged Luke to tell her what she had done and appealed to Emily to know why she was suddenly unlovable.
She even tried making excuses for Emily – she had responded to Luke’s attentions, acted on jealousy and the instincts of an overly romantic girl who had never been loved the way she craved. She hadn’t wanted Luke, she had wanted what Luke represented.
‘I suppose I know that you didn’t set out to hurt me,’ Kate said eventually. ‘You acted on the spur of the moment. I can get past you kissing Luke, I think. But what happened afterwards makes our whole friendship seem like a lie.’
Emily nodded ‘I know. I was a coward. I should have just told you. You’d have hated me for a while, but you would probably have forgiven me eventually. I am sorry, Kate, for what it’s worth.’
‘I’m sorry too. For ignoring you and Luke and acting above myself – I know I was doing that. I wasn’t sympathetic even though I could see how much you were struggling with everything back then. I neglected you and I could have been a better friend.’
Emily’s face brightened, a ray of hope dawning in her eyes. ‘Does this mean …’
Kate sighed and let several seconds tick past, the breeze catching her hair and blowing strands across her vision. ‘No, Em. It doesn’t mean anything. It means I still need to go home.’
Emily raised an eyebrow. She tried to push down the hurt, stifled the arguments that rose in her throat; Kate’s words held a note of finality she knew she couldn’t quash. She would sound pathetic if she tried. ‘But where is home, exactly?’
Kate looked at her, bewilderment showing on her face. It was the first time, since those dark days of Luke, that she had seen Kate so utterly confused. Emily was used to being the weak one, the one who couldn’t cope whilst Kate marched on capably. She considered what Kate had said, that she, Emily, had changed and could manage just fine on her own now. Yes, she decided, she probably could. But that didn’t mean she wanted to.
‘New York?’ she suggested. ‘Ben?’
‘No. I don’t think I should be looking backwards any more. I think I’ve learned that the hard way.’
God it hurt, Kate’s dismissal of all this had meant. The Solway, the bookshop, Luke, Emily: all batted away with a flick of her hand and now she was ready to move on to the next thing. She pictured Kate getting on a plane and not looking back, and it pained her more than she would have thought possible.
She thought of Luke saying, I bloody love her, Emily, and she thought of waste and lost time. How could one misstep ruin everything?
‘If not New York,’ Emily said, more calmly than she felt, ‘then where?’
‘I didn’t say not New York. I said not Ben. I was also thinking about Edinburgh, my mother.’
That wasn’t so bad; Edinburgh was only a couple of hours’ drive from here. But it wasn’t the distance, it was what leaving symbolised. If Kate walked away she would sever all ties. Or worse, Em would be reduced to a Facebook acquaintance, allowed glimpses into her life which told her nothing at all.
‘If you can’t forgive me.’ She tried one last tack. ‘Can’t you try to forgive Luke? He was the one who was drunk, and …’ She stopped short of telling Kate Luke loved her; that should come from him. If he ever got the chance now.
Kate shook her head. ‘I think we just got caught up in a memory, a moment of madness based on how we used to feel rather than how we feel now. I’m not sure you can go back and recreate the past, not really. Maybe it should stay as it was: a memory of a magical time.’
Emily sighed and felt hope sink like a stone.